Calling all Puppet Masters! OK let’s be explicit, “Agile Coach as Puppet Master” is most definitely a statement of what not to be. For the natural or aspiring Puppet Masters out there I’m sorry, you’ve come to the wrong place. You may want to watch this instead. When I talk about Agile Coach as Puppet Master…

He’s Dead Jim! OK it’s not because it has the word “dead” in it, however undesirable, there are plenty of other words in the same boat such as deadpan, deadend, that don’t offend. No it’s not that as such. It’s also not because some people would like you to interpret the word literally. The word…

Words and phrases are like viruses in that they spread from one person to another who essentially then become ‘infected’. They become an engrained habit. There’s a word which I have been trying to kick for some time. As a word in its own right it’s quite beautiful. It sounds great. However, within the context I…

Jimi Hendrix was a massive fan of technology and exploited it like no other single musician before him. He was probably aware of computers but I’m sure never gave a thought to the intricacies of software development processes and the human dynamics at the heart of it. However, there is much we can take from…

At all costs, don’t hire an asshole! This mistake will cost your team and your agile efforts dearly. Asshole is a strong word and worthy of a precise definition. Luckily, Bob Sutton provides exactly that in his classic book: “The No Asshole Rule”. He defines two criteria that test for the presence of an ‘asshole’:…

The ability to communicate compellingly and persuasively are highly valuable skills. This TED talk presents the case for using comedy to succinctly express an idea and in a way that has immediate and lasting impact. Furthermore, comedy also makes people want to spread the idea so that it gathers even more momentum. So the next time you…

The core content of this post was forged in the fire of an intense agile project that was the conception and creation of the international edition of the BBC Homepage for BBC.com. The project team was assembled and some engineers had worked on the original domestic homepage but this was a complete redesign and rewrite,…

When working on requirements, how is your time split between communicating and documenting? It’s very easy to feel the pressure to get requirements documented so that they can move through the development pipeline, so that designers and developers can start to design and build some working software, to build the next feature. On agile projects…